Cigarette Commercials

These stopped when I was in grammar school, and yet they’ve remained pretty vivid in memory.

It’s fascinating to see these now. Part of me suspects that, if you really want to understand an era, don’t look at its movies or its politics, look at its commercials, because all of a culture’s lies and false assumptions — which is, in a way, the same as to say all of its dreams — are in those commercials. So what do these commercials say to us? What do they reveal?

Also, in memory, or in imagined history, we might think of 1970 in terms of, say, Nixon. Or Let It Be. Or Live at Leeds. But what people really lived with on a daily basis, what really pervaded daily life, that made up the backdrop of people’s consciousnesses, were these odd choruses and orchestrations, these peppy horn sections and mellow innocuous voices. Totally bizarre.

Here’s one for Kent:

And one for L&M:

And how about this Kool commercial. Is it meant to entice men or women? (I think men.)